Quick Facts
Biography
Eric Tagliacozzo is Professor of History at Cornell University, where he teaches Southeast Asian history. He is the director of Cornell's Comparative Muslim Societies Program, the director of Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, and the contributing editor of journal Indonesia. Tagliacozzo received his B.A. from Haverford College in 1989 and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1999.
Research
Tagliacozzo's research focuses on the history of people, ideas, and material in motion in and around Southeast Asia, especially in the late colonial age. His first book, Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier (Yale, 2005), which won the 2007 Harry Benda Prize, examined many of these ideas by analyzing the history of smuggling in the region. Several edited volumes also look at Southeast Asia's connections with the Middle East; at the idea of Indonesia over a two thousand year-period; and at the meeting of History and Anthropology generally (and conceptually) as disciplines. His book, The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Oxford, 2013) attempts to write a history of this very broad topic from earliest times to the present.